Tabu Search Heuristic for Period Vehicle Routing Problem

• Main Authors: Jun-ying Lee, 李俊穎
• Other Authors: Suh-wen Chiou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/fzvwh3

碩士 === 大同大學 === 資訊經營學系(所) === 93 === The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) under capacity and distance restrictions involves the design of minimum cost delivery routes for a fleet of vehicles, originating and terminating at a central depot, which serves a set of customers. This thesis present Tabu search algorithm for the Period Vehicle Routing Problem, the problem not only designs vehicle routes to meet required service levels for customers but also minimize distribution costs over a given several day period of time . The VRP belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, and polynomial time algorithms for finding optimal solutions are unlikely to exist. Hence, there have been few attempts to solve it optimally among an exact algorithm based on branch and bound procedures. The branch and bound approach address small VRP adequately up to 50 customers with 8 vehicles, the approach to solve big VRP must spend the maximum of greatest time and cost. Due to limited success of exact methods, considerable attention and research effort have been devoted to the development of efficient heuristics algorithm which can provide near optimal solutions for large-sized problems in limited time. But heuristic algorithm yielding solutions whose quality often not good enough. In this thesis, applied linear programming and Savings procedure to find an initial feasible solution of PVRP, then use Tabu search to improve the One-point movement algorithm, finding improved solutions whose quality significantly surpasses that obtained by traditional heuristics.